'Burglary Tourism' Ravages California - Is It Time to Cheer for the Burglars?
After years of enacting far-left policies to the detriment of its ordinary, law-abiding citizens, California has become almost an archetypal example of the failure of leftist ideology.
Thanks in part to California’s generous immigration policy, California has recently been plagued by well-organized gangs of burglars taking advantage of California’s welcoming policies.
As reported in Fox News on Tuesday, it appears that Chile in particular has taken advantage of a policy called the U.S. Visa Waiver program.
This program allows tourists and business travelers to come into the country for 90 days without a visa.
Chile is the only Latin American country out of 41 nations that has been approved for the program.
And, according to Fox, several Chilean citizens have been abusing this policy for their own gain.
Specifically, Chilean gangs of burglars have entered the country under this program to case out and then ransack the homes of wealthy Americans, Californians in particular.
Known as “burglary tourists,” these gangs have robbed houses up and down California, using cell phone jammers to disrupt Wi-Fi signals and disable home security, disguising themselves in bushes to watch for when homeowners leave, and breaking into second-story windows to avoid the ground-floor security alarms.
It’s gotten so bad that the Los Angeles Police Department has had to create a task force specifically dedicated to stopping these “burglary tourists, according to NBC News.
LAPD police chief Alan Hamilton estimated that, in one wealthy neighborhood of Los Angeles, there were 94 different burglaries, according to the Daily Mail.
Just last year, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer was warning residents about these robberies. “These are not crimes of opportunity,” he said, according to Fox News. “These are carefully calculated and planned attacks on what should be our safe place — our homes.”
Part of the problem is that, while the countries who participate in the visa waiver program are supposed to conduct their own criminal background checks, Chile has apparently not been doing so.
The other part is that California is insanely easy to enter if you’re not an American citizen, whether you’re legal or not.
While these gangs have struck other states in the country, some of them even taking a cross-country trip from Florida to Alaska, burgling homes all the way, the gangs have concentrated their efforts in California.
And indeed, the 17-year-old leader of one of these had been arrested and released twice, thanks in part to California’s notorious soft-on-crime policies, before the LAPD formed their task force.
California has been plagued by problems of homelessness, fifth on the street, crime sprees that empty the shelves of local Walgreens stores and illegal immigration that threatens to strain the limits of the state’s infrastructure.
All of which are the inevitable fruits of their far-left, soft-on-crime legislation and policies.
Some people watching the chaos in California may think it’s time to cheer on the international burglary gangs — after all, California did this to itself, they say, and maybe the unintended consequences will wake the liberals up to reality.
Is it right to cheer on these burglary gangs?
Obviously not. However, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, the states are “laboratories of democracy,” meaning states and local communities are free to craft their own policies and pass their own laws for the particular needs and benefits of their citizens.
Or, like California, the liberal lawmakers and majority liberal cities can enact policies that work perfectly well in the ivory tower of an Ivy League classroom, but prove disastrous when implemented in the real world.
California liberals took insane chances regarding criminal prosecution and social issues and preached at the rest of the country that they’re evil, hateful people for not doing the same.
And now, those chances are blowing up in their faces.
Perhaps conservatives can be forgiven for indulging in a bit of schadenfreude.
After all, the liberals in Los Angeles and other affluent California cities are, by and large, just getting what they voted for.
So, no, we shouldn’t cheer on the gangs blatantly breaking the law and threatening the safety of innocent citizens.
But we should pay attention to where California’s far-left policies go awry and appreciate the chaos that bad laws produce.
And, most importantly, we should learn what to avoid so our cities and states don’t turn into the liberal hellhole that is now California.
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